


by conduct of some star

by toujours_nigel



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Married Characters, Married Couple, Other, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Polyshipping Day, Pre-Poly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-14 01:55:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16483859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: Thus Thomas found himself at thirty-five without any notion of how to persuade even a willing man into his bed.





	by conduct of some star

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Edmund Spenser's Sonnet 34, _Amoretti_ , 'Like a ship'.

“You cannot simply stuff him full of sweets and bid him be attentive to your paroxysms of joy or lectures on governance,” Miranda scolded, and then said in quite a different voice, which he liked as little, “You have no idea how to go about this, do you Thomas?”

Thomas might have protested, but in truth he did not. Among men of their class and his interests, there existed an understanding that made subtle pursuit unnecessary: there were few enough among that already small number who agreed with Thomas on matters of political philosophy that he would not have shut any out of such favours as he had in his keeping. He had never had to pursue any of them, and even in his early flirtations with Miranda, she had been the one who had coaxed from him words with smiles, books with arguments, love with unstinting affection.

Thus he found himself at thirty-five without any notion of how to persuade even a willing man into his bed, and without very much surety than James McGraw was as willing as he’d thought. He had come into that first kiss with undammed passion, but had retreated too as sure as the tide, and if little wavelets of affection still broke his banks of reserve...

“I am no good at nautical metaphors,” he told Miranda after a disjointed silence that her smile told him she’d followed well enough.

It was her smile he’d first noted, squiring an eager Arabella Cavendish around a party that bored him to  tears: the wicked smile that stretched a generous mouth too red for a girl just out and set the eyes to sparkling. Arabella Cavendish was seven years in her grave, and Miranda’s smile was still as wickedly lovely as it had ever been in seven years of keeping pace with his ideas and outpacing him in their execution. She was the one who had first managed to wring love out of their beautiful James, even if it had been he who’d spotted potential in stern and stolid Lieutenant McGraw.

On an impulse he seized her hands and kissed them with unwonted deliberation, both palms and thin-skinned wrists and every pearl-polished fingertip, every delicately-etched joint.

“Sir,” she exclaimed, amused and well-pleased, her cheeks incarnadining beneath the powder. “You must pay heed to your new dalliance and not your well-worn wife. What need have you of nautical metaphors, unless to speak of the evening star and love’s constancy?”

“Where may I turn but to the sea, in thinking of one so devotedly Poseidon’s votary? And then he is so burnished: copper-haired and sun-touched like one kissed by Apollo himself.”

“You must not shuffle Olympians,” Miranda said, and emphasised her admonition by pinching his grasping fingers. “Thomas.”

“Miranda?”

“You must remember that he comes from a world very different than ours, in all fashions. He was utterly lost when he first attended our gatherings, not for any want of intelligence or interest, but simply for want of the cultivation of either.”

“Do you think so,” he asked, astonished but acquiescent, because Miranda was the more astute of them, and he had considered her so since first he was privileged to hear her analysis of the McCarthy-Spencer tangle, couched as lightly as a matter for the stage rather than sordid political theatre. “But a man of his parts and passions, he must have known, he must have been told.”

“Perhaps,” Miranda agreed. “But think how ill we are taught to think even of love between man and woman, how you and I have had to work to free it from its tangles of shame and exhibition, lay it out in its natural shape. For a man like our James, always told he fits his desired place in the world but ill...”

“Yes,” he breathed out, as much an exclamation of pain as he could allow himself. For a man like James McGraw, who had come up in the world through grit and grudging patronage, refused the Lieutenant’s commission while younger and weaker men went past him on the strength of their fathers’ names, anything that set him further from the ordinary could only be a weakness to be suppressed with all his magnificent strength. It could not be borne. “Miranda.”

“Think how convincing he is now, when he chooses to speak, and how clever even when he stays silent.”

“He came to you without struggle.”

Miranda laughed. “Darling, is that what you believe? I had a harder time of it than I have since, oh, Chas  Hardwick. And it is easier with me, for him.”

“It still breaks man’s laws, and God’s,” Thomas said, because it was an exhausting task, to draw a man out of the husk of his wrong-headed beliefs, and often led to rifts and recriminations. He hardly liked it save when stultified with boredom. There was so much to do, to plan, to create, so much work for the three-headed hydra that combined his principles and James’ knowledge and Miranda’s relentless drive, so much to risk, for the sake of... of what, after all, that he could not buy at market, but must glean like some scavenging peasant when the harvest had fallen ripe into Miranda’s hands?

“It does not shatter his knowledge of himself. Even Jacob served seven years, for his Rachel.”

“If you shall make certain no Leah is served up to me by deceit,” he said and smiled to draw an answering smile from her. This one, unlike her wide and wicked smile, was one he saw but rarely and nobody else, he knew, had seen at all. Miranda Hamilton, Viscountess Wirksworth, smiling softly to signal only tenderness. He was not the sort of man who relished violence, but he would build nations for that smile, raise cities and save colonies.

“He is worthy of the work,” Miranda told him, and smiled broader when he turned the hand he still held to kiss the back of it: a courtier’s kiss, a promise.

**Author's Note:**

> Arabella Cavendish is a historical figure, the McCarthy-Spenser tangle one that involved her husband and brother-in-law. While the Hardwick family is real and was prominent at the relevant time, Charles is fictional.


End file.
